Taking the Field: A Fan’s Quest to Run the Team He Loves (review)

Howard Megdal is a New York City sportswriter for several Internet outlets, including the website of Sports New York, the cable channel that carries the New York Mets. He’s been an unabashed Mets fan since youth, even before his staid, lawyer father jumped off the couch and performed an impromptu Mexican hat dance in front of the television when Lenny Dykstra hit his game-winning homer in the 1986 National League championship series. Supported by his wife, Rachel, he lulls his baby daughter Mirabelle to sleep with major-league trade rumors and analysis of the game they are watching before she nods off.

He has seen the Mets win it all, and he wants them to be a power again. He lent his energy, quite a lot of it, to the cause by launching a campaign during the 2010 season to become the team’s next general manager; he correctly identifies Omar Minaya, the Mets’ GM from 2005 to 2010, as a short-timer due to the team’s poor record (below .500 since 2008). This book is the result, since, of course, he didn’t get the job. It’s an appealing combination of campaign manifesto, personal memoir, and a fan’s obsession for his favorite team.

Dana Brand, a fellow blogger, nails Megdal’s campaign perfectly: “it’s the kind of smart, wacky, performance art that baseball could use” (34). His campaign slogan, LOGIC, TRANSPARENCY, PASSION (always all caps) sums up what he thinks the Mets have lacked—particularly the logic.

Megdal’s plan doesn’t promise short-term success. As he sees it, there are “deep structural flaws in the way the New York Mets operate” (23). He would fix this primarily by making the team more aggressive in the annual amateur draft (as the real new GM, Sandy Alderson, is doing), spending as much money as possible on developing the draftees and looking for good pickups among young prospects who exhibit promise measured by moderately new-fangled statistics such as on-base plus slugging average (OPS) for hitters and strikeouts and walks per nine innings for pitchers.

Megdal recalls, with professional disdain and a fan’s pain, the trades of two young pitchers, first future Hall of Famer Nolan Ryan and then Scott Kazmir, who had some good years after leaving New York, for largely over-the-hill and undistinguished talent in return. He recounts in great detail how his favorite GM, Frank Cashen, put together 1969’s “Amazing Mets” from draft picks, cheap signings of young players, and, of course, a little bit of luck. The Mets got Tom Seaver from a hat-pick lottery after his original contract with the Braves was voided.

Although he yearns to succeed Minaya, Megdal doesn’t paint him in the demonic tones you might expect a challenger to splash over the incumbent. To Howard, Omar was “a nice man who was in over his head” after taking control of the team in 2005. This is no way to carry on red-meat American politics, but our candidate is looking way beyond the 2011 season, and he seems to be a nice guy, although one with a lot of opinions about how things ought to change.

He does have an arch villain, though. It’s Minaya’s predecessor, Steve Phillips. Phillips, who became a punching bag for critics as a general manager and then a veritable piñata in his next career as a television baseball analyst, is seen as a disaster that could have wrecked the team if he had stayed around long enough. Megdal analyzes Phillips seemingly endless love for veteran players with track records, although the vets Phillips wanted often came at the expense of the young prospects Megdal would keep around, and “only errors by other general managers prevented Phillips from leaving the organization as bereft of talent as it had been at any point in its history” (50). [End...